And down in the meadow Muskwa ran to Thor with a bit of warm black hide in his mouth, and Thor lowered his great bleeding head, and just once his red tongue shot out and caressed Muskwa's face. For the little tan-faced cub had proved himself; and it may be that Thor had seen and understood.

CHAPTER NINE

Neither Thor nor Muskwa went near the caribou meat after the big fight.

Thor was in no condition to eat, and Muskwa was so filled with excitement and trembling that he could not swallow a mouthful. He continued to worry a strip of black hide, snarling and growling in his puny way, as though finishing what the other had begun.

For many minutes the grizzly stood with his big head drooping, and the blood gathered in splashes under him. He was facing down the valley. There was almost no wind--so little that it was scarcely possible to tell from which direction it came. Eddies of it were caught in the coulees, and higher up about the shoulders and peaks it blew stronger. Now and then one of these higher movements of air would sweep gently downward and flow through the valley for a few moments in a great noiseless breath that barely stirred the tops of the balsams and spruce.

One of these mountain-breaths came as Thor faced the east. And with it, faint and terrible, came the _man-smell_!

Thor roused himself with a sudden growl from the lethargy into which he had momentarily allowed himself to sink. His relaxed muscles hardened. He raised his head and sniffed the wind.

Muskwa ceased his futile fight with the bit of hide and also sniffed the air. It was warm with the man-scent, for Langdon and Bruce were running and sweating, and the odour of man-sweat drifts heavy and far. It filled Thor with a fresh rage. For a second time it came when he was hurt and bleeding.

He had already a.s.sociated the man-smell with hurt, and now it was doubly impressed upon him. He turned his head and snarled at the mutilated body of the big black. Then he snarled menacingly in the face of the wind. He was in no humour to run away. In these moments, if Bruce and Langdon had appeared over the rise, Thor would have charged with that deadly ferocity which lead can scarcely stop, and which has given to his kind their terrible name.

But the breath of air pa.s.sed, and there followed a peaceful calm. The valley was filled with the purr of running water; from their rocks the whistlers called forth their soft notes; up on the green plain the ptarmigan were fluting, and rising in white-winged flocks. These things soothed Thor, as a woman's gentle hand quiets an angry man. For five minutes he continued to rumble and growl as he tried vainly to catch the scent again; but the rumbling and growling grew steadily less, and finally he turned and walked slowly toward the coulee down which he and Muskwa had come a little while before. Muskwa followed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'Come on!' he cried. 'The black's dead! If we hustle we can get our grizzly!'"]

The coulee, or ravine, hid them from the valley as they ascended. Its bottom was covered with rock and shale. The wounds Thor had received in the fight, unlike bullet wounds, had stopped bleeding after the first few minutes, and he left no telltale red spots behind. The ravine took them to the first chaotic upheaval of rock halfway up the mountain, and here they were still more lost to view from below.

They stopped and drank at a pool formed by the melting snow on the peaks, and then went on. Thor did not stop when they reached the ledge on which they had slept the previous night. And this time Muskwa was not tired when they reached the ledge. Two days had made a big change in the little tan-faced cub. He was not so round and puffy. And he was stronger--a great deal stronger; he was becoming hardened, and under Thor's strenuous tutelage he was swiftly graduating from cubhood to young bearhood.

It was evident that Thor had followed this ledge at some previous time. He knew where he was going. It continued up and up, and finally seemed to end in the face of a precipitous wall of rock. Thor's trail led him directly to a great crevice, hardly wider than his body, and through this he went, emerging at the edge of the wildest and roughest slide of rock that Muskwa had ever seen. It looked like a huge quarry, and it broke through the timber far below them, and reached almost to the top of the mountain above.

For Muskwa to make his way over the thousand pitfalls of that chaotic upheaval was an impossibility, and as Thor began to climb over the first rocks the cub stopped and whined. It was the first time he had given up, and when he saw that Thor gave no attention to his whine, terror seized upon him and he cried for help as loudly as he could while he hunted frantically for a path up through the rocks.

Utterly oblivious of Muskwa's predicament, Thor continued until he was fully thirty yards away. Then he stopped, faced about deliberately, and waited.

This gave Muskwa courage, and he scratched and clawed and even used his chin and teeth in his efforts to follow. It took him ten minutes to reach Thor, and he was completely winded. Then, all at once, his terror vanished.

For Thor stood on a white, narrow path that was as solid as a floor.

The path was perhaps eighteen inches wide. It was unusual--and mysterious-looking, and strangely out of place where it was. It looked as though an army of workmen had come along with hammers and had broken up tons of sandstone and slate, and then filled in between the boulders with rubble, making a smooth and narrow road that in places was ground to the fineness of powder and the hardness of cement. But instead of hammers, the hoofs of a hundred or perhaps a thousand generations of mountain sheep had made the trail. It was the sheep-path over the range. The first band of bighorn may have blazed the way before Columbus discovered America; surely it had taken a great many years for hoofs to make that smooth road among the rocks.

Thor used the path as one of his highways from valley to valley, and there were other creatures of the mountains who used it as well as he, and more frequently. As he stood waiting for Muskwa to get his wind they both heard an odd chuckling sound approaching them from above. Forty or fifty feet up the slide the path twisted and descended a little depression behind a huge boulder, and out from behind this boulder came a big porcupine.

There is a law throughout the North that a man shall not kill a porcupine.

He is the "lost man's friend," for the wandering and starving prospector or hunter can nearly always find a porcupine, if nothing else; and a child can kill him. He is the humourist of the wilderness--the happiest, the best-natured, and altogether the mildest-mannered beast that ever drew breath. He talks and chatters and chuckles incessantly, and when he travels he walks like a huge animated pincushion; he is oblivious of everything about him as though asleep.

As this particular "porky" advanced upon Muskwa and Thor, he was communing happily with himself, the chuckling notes he made sounding very much like a baby's cooing. He was enormously fat, and as he waddled slowly along his side and tail quills clicked on the stones. His eyes were on the path at his feet. He was deeply absorbed in nothing at all, and he was within five feet of Thor before he saw the grizzly. Then, in a wink, he humped himself into a ball. For a few seconds he scolded vociferously. After that he was as silent as a sphinx, his little red eyes watching the big bear.

Thor did not want to kill him, but the path was narrow, and he was ready to go on. He advanced a foot or two, and Porky turned his back toward Thor and made ready to deliver a swipe with his powerful tail. In that tail were several hundred quills. As Thor had more than once come into contact with porcupine quills, he hesitated.

Muskwa was looking on curiously. He still had his lesson to learn, for the quill he had once picked up in his foot had been a loose quill. But since the porcupine seemed to puzzle Thor, the cub turned and made ready to go back along the slide if it became necessary. Thor advanced another foot, and with a sudden _chuck, chuck, chuck_--the most vicious sound he was capable of making--Porky advanced backward and his broad, thick tail whipped through the air with a force that would have driven quills a quarter of an inch into the b.u.t.t of a tree. Having missed, he humped himself again, and Thor stepped out on the boulder and circled around him.

There he waited for Muskwa.

Porky was immensely satisfied with his triumph. He unlimbered himself; his quills settled a bit; and he advanced toward Muskwa, at the same time resuming his good-natured chuckling. Instinctively the cub hugged the edge of the path, and in doing so slipped over the edge. By the time he had scrambled up again Porky was four or five feet beyond him and totally absorbed in his travel.

The adventure of the sheep-trail was not yet quite over, for scarcely had Porky maneuvered himself to safety when around the edge of the big boulder above appeared a badger, hot on the fresh and luscious scent of his favourite dinner, a porcupine. This worthless outlaw of the mountains was three times as large as Muskwa, and every ounce of him was fighting muscle and bone and claw and sharp teeth. He had a white mark on his nose and forehead; his legs were short and thick; his tail was bushy, and the claws on his front feet were almost as long as a bear's. Thor greeted him with an immediate growl of warning, and the badger scooted back up the trail in fear of his life.

Meanwhile Porky lumbered slowly along in quest of new feeding-grounds, talking and singing to himself, forgetting entirely what had happened a minute or two before, and unconscious of the fact that Thor had saved him from a death as certain as though he had fallen over a thousand-foot precipice.

For nearly a mile Thor and Muskwa followed the Bighorn Highway before its winding course brought them at last to the very top of the range. They were fully three-quarters of a mile above the creek-bottom, and so narrow in places was the crest of the mountain along which the sheep-trail led that they could look down into both valleys.

To Muskwa it was all a greenish golden haze below him; the depths seemed illimitable; the forest along the stream was only a black streak, and the parklike clumps of balsams and cedars on the farther slopes looked like very small bosks of thorn or buffalo willow.

Up here the wind was blowing, too. It whipped him with a strange fierceness, and half a dozen times he felt the mysterious and very unpleasant chill of snow under his feet. Twice a great bird swooped near him. It was the biggest bird he had ever seen--an eagle. The second time it came so near that he heard the _beat_ of it, and saw its great, fierce head and lowering talons.

Thor whirled toward the eagle and growled. If Muskwa had been alone, the cub would have gone sailing off in those murderous talons. As it was, the third time the eagle circled it was down the slope from them. It was after other game. The scent of the game came to Thor and Muskwa, and they stopped.

Perhaps a hundred yards below them was a shelving slide of soft shale, and on this shale, basking in the warm sun after their morning's feed lower down, was a band of sheep. There were twenty or thirty of them, mostly ewes and their lambs. Three huge old rams were lying on a patch of snow farther to the east.

With his six-foot wings spread out like twin fans, the eagle continued to circle. He was as silent as a feather floating with the wind. The ewes and even the old bighorns were unconscious of his presence over them. Most of the lambs were lying close to their mothers, but two or three of a livelier turn of mind were wandering over the shale and occasionally hopping about in playful frolic.

The eagle's fierce eyes were upon these youngsters. Suddenly he drifted farther away--a full rifle-shot distance straight in the face of the wind; then he swung gracefully, and came back with the wind. And as he came, his wings apparently motionless, he gathered greater and greater speed, and shot like a rocket straight for the lambs. He seemed to have come and gone like a great shadow, and just one plaintive, agonized bleat marked his pa.s.sing-and two little lambs were left where there had been three.

There was instant commotion on the slide. The ewes began to run back and forth and bleat excitedly. The three rams sprang up and stood like rocks, their huge battlemented heads held high as they scanned the depths below them and the peaks above for new danger.

One of them saw Thor, and the deep, grating bleat of warning that rattled out of his throat a hunter could have heard a mile away. As he gave his danger signal he started down the slide, and in another moment an avalanche of hoofs was clattering down the steep shale slope, loosening small stones and boulders that went tumbling and crashing down the mountain with a din that steadily increased as they set others in motion on the way. This was all mighty interesting to Muskwa, and he would have stood for a long time looking down for other things to happen if Thor had not led him on.

After a time the Bighorn Highway began to descend into the valley from the upper end of which Thor had been driven by Langdon's first shots. They were now six or eight miles north of the timber in which the hunters had made their permanent camp, and headed for the lower tributaries of the Skeena.

Another hour of travel, and the bare shale and gray crags were above them again, and they were on the green slopes. After the rocks, and the cold winds, and the terrible glare he had seen in the eagle's eyes, the warm and lovely valley into which they were descending lower and lower was a paradise to Muskwa.

It was evident that Thor had something in his mind. He was not rambling now. He cut off the ends and the bulges of the slopes. With his head hunched low he travelled steadily northward, and a compa.s.s could not have marked out a straighter line for the lower waters of the Skeena. He was tremendously businesslike, and Muskwa, tagging bravely along behind, wondered if he were never going to stop; if there could be anything in the whole wide world finer for a big grizzly and a little tan-faced cub than these wonderful sunlit slopes which Thor seemed in such great haste to leave.

CHAPTER TEN

If it had not been for Langdon, this day of the fight between the two bears would have held still greater excitement and another and deadlier peril for Thor and Muskwa. Three minutes after the hunters had arrived breathless and sweating upon the scene of the sanguinary conflict Bruce was ready and anxious to continue the pursuit of Thor. He knew the big grizzly could not be far away; he was certain that Thor had gone up the mountain. He found signs of the grizzly's feet in the gravel of the coulee at just about the time Thor and the tan-faced cub struck the Bighorn Highway.

His arguments failed to move Langdon. Stirred to the depth of his soul by what he had seen, and what he saw about him now, the hunter-naturalist refused to leave the blood-stained and torn-up arena in which the grizzly and the black had fought their duel.

"If I knew that I was not going to fire a single shot, I would travel five thousand miles to see this," he said. "It's worth thinking about, and looking over, Bruce. The grizzly won't spoil. This will--in a few hours. If there's a story here we can dig out I want it."

Again and again Langdon went over the battlefield, noting the ripped-up ground, the big spots of dark-red stain, the strips of flayed skin, and the terrible wounds on the body of the dead black. For half an hour Bruce paid less attention to these things than he did to the carca.s.s of the caribou.

At the end of that time he called Langdon to the edge of the clump of balsams.

"You wanted the story," he said, "an' I've got it for you, Jimmy."

He entered the balsams and Langdon followed him. A few steps under the cover Bruce halted and pointed to the hollow in which Thor had cached his meat. The hollow was stained with blood.